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| Does Honest Advertising Pay Off When Selecting A Mate? |
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| SciMed - Biology | |||
| TS-Si News Service | |||
| Tuesday, 23 June 2009 09:00 | |||
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Fairfax, VA, USA. A certain smile, the way he moves you. Some outward display, however subtle, can be an initial signal of suitability in a male. But can you trust your senses? Throughout the animal kingdom, brilliant colors or elaborate behavioral displays by males serve as "advertisements" for attracting female mates. But, what do the ads promise, and is there any truth in the advertizing? Researchers at Yale theorize that when males must provide care for the survival of their offspring, the males' signals will consistently be honest — and they may devote more of their energy to caring for their offspring than to being attractive. The idea that males showcase their best qualities to attract females for mating isn't a new one, nor is the idea that they might be deceptive in what they are promoting. Instead, the new findings better predict the requirement for honesty in advertising as a function of the male's suitability for parenting, according to Natasha Kelly, a graduate student in ecology and evolutionary biology at Yale University and lead author of the study.
London, United Kingdom. New findings argue for the persistence of sex-linked chromosomes, such as the male Y  chromosome, refuting theories that the Y is doomed to extinction.
The results confirm that although these chromosom..."The qualifier in this case is where males are obligated to provide care ... In that case, the quiet guy in the corner might be giving the more reliable advertisement for fatherhood."When a male's energy is heavily focused on keeping up his appearance to impress the ladies, he may have little energy left that he can devote to caring for offspring. But that may be okay, say the researchers — in species where he does not really need to tend to the kids. Previous research suggested that, under certain circumstances, males could be dishonest about their parenting skills and still have high reproductive success. This new model, now appearing in the online version of the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Science, examines the reliability of males' mating signals when they must care for offspring — an aspect that was missing in earlier studies.
"This new work shows that when males can not escape the cost of failing to provide care, their advertisements will tend to tend to reliably indicate how much care they will provide," said senior author Suzanne Alonzo, assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Yale. "The qualifier in this case is where males are obligated to provide care," said Kelly. "In that case, the quiet guy in the corner might be giving the more reliable advertisement for fatherhood."
CitationWill male advertisement be a reliable indicator of paternal care, if offspring survival depends on male care? Natasha B. Kelly and Suzanne H. Alonzo. Proceedings of The Royal Society B Biological Sciences 2009 (published online before print). doi: 10.1098/rspb.2009.0599
Abstract Existing theory predicts that male signalling can be an unreliable indicator of paternal care, but assumes that males with high levels of mating success can have high current reproductive success, without providing any parental care. As a result, this theory does not hold for the many species where offspring survival depends on male parental care. We modelled male allocation of resources between advertisement and care for species with male care where males vary in quality, and the effect of care and advertisement on male fitness is multiplicative rather than additive. Our model predicts that males will allocate proportionally more of their resources to whichever trait (advertisement or paternal care) is more fitness limiting. In contrast to previous theory, we find that male advertisement is always a reliable indicator of paternal care and male phenotypic quality (e.g. males with higher levels of advertisement never allocate less to care than males with lower levels of advertisement). Our model shows that the predicted pattern of male allocation and the reliability of male signalling depend very strongly on whether paternal care is assumed to be necessary for offspring survival and how male care affects offspring survival and male fitness.Keywords: sexual selection, reproductive strategies, male allocation, parental care.
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| Last Updated on Friday, 10 July 2009 23:22 |
There are many species in which males could, but do not have to, provide parental care — because females will pick up the slack. The Yale researchers focused on those species, like stickleback fish, where females cannot pick up the slack and males who do not provide care risk the survival of their offspring.
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